Digital Promotion – Ampro Media

26 October 2023

TUTORIAL: Facebook Events

Ampro MediaDigital Marketing, Digital Promotion, Online Marketing concerts, Digital Marketing, Digital Promotion, Events, Facebook, Facebook Events, How to, shows, Tutorial

Facebook Events are an awesome digital marketing & promotion tool!

First and most obviously, they list your event on your band page, on Facebook, for free. Every band or show should be using them all the time. But more than that, there are specific things you should think about to get maximum exposure for your event.

So what happens when you create an event? Here’s the list:

The Event gets published to your bands event list on their page.
Facebook puts that event on your main page, as a Facebook post, which in turn will go out to many people following your page.
Facebook puts that event in front of some of your friends.

This by itself is a great place to share your band imagery, your artwork, your brand or indeed your content. But there is something far more powerful available to you with Facebook Events.

Once your event is posted, you can invite people to it. Now depending on how you have your Facebook page set up, you might be logged into Facebook on your band profile or your personal profile. The trick here is to set up an Event under your band profile but then switch to your personal profile. Once you’re in your personal profile, you can go back to your event and invite all your Facebook friends to the event.

Click the INVITE button on the event page:

When you click the INVITE button, Facebook opens a new dialogue box that allows you to select which of your personal friends to invite to your show:

From this box, you can select ALL FRIENDS and then select the friends in the list that you want to invite to the event. Our suggestion would be to suggest ALL your friends.

Now I know what you’re going to say… You might not want to invite all your friends because you don’t want to annoy people who perhaps live at the other side of the world or for whatever reason, would never attend your show. This is a mistake. You should absolutely invite ALL your friends! The reason?

Firstly, you won’t annoy them. They will have the option of blocking your event invites when they receive them and if they do block your invites, that’s a great thing because it qualifies your invite list for you. The same is true of unsubscribers when they unsubscribe from your email database (you DO have an email database don’t you?). Every unsubscribe means the mailing list qualifies itself to become that bit more targeted. You would much rather send 10 emails to fans of your show rather than 10,000 random emails wouldn’t you? Your database is far more powerful when it’s qualified and targeted.

The second major reason you might want to invite ALL your friends is, you friends might not respond to the invite, but there is a chance that their friends will see the event and their friends are more likely to respond or share the event if it’s also socially qualified (ie they can easily see that their friends are also going to the event or at the very least interested in it).

Think about the numbers here. If your band has 5 musicians and they all have 500 friends on Facebook, that’s 2,500 invites sent out to real people that they personally know. If each of those friends has 500 friends, then there is the potential to have your invite put in front of 1,250,000 real people on Facebook, multiple times. What’s even better is, that Event becomes associated with each person on Facebook even if they don’t respond to it and when they are looking at other events at any point in the future, there’s a good chance that your event will pop up in front of them as a possibly interesting event for them, which means multiple exposures to your band, your show, your artwork and your brand. Did we mention, all of this costs nothing? It’s completely free. Even if you get only one ticket sale from this entire exercise, you’ve just made a tenner for two minutes work!

The final thing to do when you’re setting up an event on Facebook is to make sure you use all the boxes on the event setup itself. An important one is CO-HOSTS. The host of the event is your band (assuming you set the event up on your band page) or yourself (assuming you set it up on your personal Facebook profile). But you can also add other entities on Facebook as a co-host. For example, the venue, the promoter or indeed anyone else involved in the event in an official capacity. When those entities accept the co-host (tell them about it!), this same event will be listed in their events page. You will end up with one Facebook event, centrally administered by any and all co-hosts. The promoter and venue will use that event. It will appear on their Facebook page when they want to post it easily.

Want to see it in action?

Right now, I’m on a Facebook Event page, for an event that I am a co-host on. On the side of my screen is a list of 6 suggested events.

1 of those events is my own
1 of those events I am a co-host on because I’m helping to promote them. If I wasn’t a co-host, Facebook would use this space to suggest another event to me.
All the other events are nothing to do with me BUT, they are all highly targeted because all of them are in my area and 1 of them I attended in 2022 but didn’t know it was happening again in 2023.
4 of those events are “socially herding” me to them, because I can clearly see multiple friends are also attending or interested.
2 of these events are happening in the next 2 days.

That’s powerful marketing!

So you see, there are many amazing reasons to use Facebook Events and to use them properly. We haven’t even begun to dive into the posibilities when it comes to combining Facebook Events with paid digital marketing campaigns on Facebook. That’s for another day perhaps.

Would you like a video of your entire show, filmed in glorious HD quality, to sell to your audience, free of charge? Get in touch with us right now! We are looking for clients that can quickly get over the “too good to be true” issue, because right now, that’s the biggest problem we have in our business! 🙂

5 March 2019

Posters Don’t Work

Ampro MediaDigital Marketing, Digital Promotion, Online Marketing Advertising, Ampro Media, Artist, Band, Concert, Digital Marketing, Digital Promotion, Facebook, Flyers, Google Ads, Online Marketing, Pay-per-click, Posters, PPC., Show, Theatre

Posters – the primary source of marketing for your show

How do you promote your shows? Could it be that you rely on the tried and tested method of putting a few posters up and supplying the venue with flyers to put next to countless other flyers? There’s a reason so many live music venues are going out of business or have gone out of business over the last few years. As the title of this post suggests, posters don’t work.

Why would a tried and tested method of show promotion no longer work? Well, it’s all tied into this new tool we call the internet. Put simply, the internet has over the last twenty years or so, reprogrammed virtually every human being in the UK. That’s a bold claim to make, but the evidence is there for anyone to see.

Look Up. Look Down. Look Out. Look around.

Back in the day, it was fine to print some posters up and together with flyers, advertise a show locally, around a venue. This kind of advertising was a primary method of informing people about the show and getting word out to prospective ticket buyers. The average person consumed such information by looking up at the world as they passed through, reading the signs, taking in the posters, talking face to face with their friends & family and generally keeping an open view of everything in their immediate circle.

These days, the opposite is true. The average person is looking down at their smart phone or tablet. They’re stuck behind a computer or wrapped up in the world of social networking. They’re discussing events on the other side of the world but at the same time, they don’t know what’s happening on their street and they’ve no idea what’s going on at their local theatre.

Let’s be clear, posters and indeed flyers do have a place in our promotion tool box. They’re effective means of reaching a very specific group of people and that is the people who go to the venue prior to your show, to see a different show. In this instance, we merely have to hope that people look up, see the posters, pick up the flyers and understand your show. Assuming they do, it’s money well spent. But if they don’t, it’s still money spent.

Digital, online marketing is a huge shift in thinking

There is a reason that Facebook & Google are now such huge companies. Both of these companies have built huge empires, mostly on the back of advertising revenue. That is to say, charging businesses to advertise to their users. It’s no accident that Facebook & Google are worth billions. They can simply offer something to businesses that nobody else can – laser like targeting of their potential customers, that works, at a very reasonable cost.

For example, many of these digital marketing systems don’t even charge you if you are not getting a result. They display your ads for free, until such time as someone clicks your ad to see what you are trying to sell and only then, do you get charged. This is yet another powerful, unique ability that only exists in digital marketing. Imagine not having to pay out £500.00 for a magazine ad and instead only paying a few pence when someone looked at your ad and then went to the correct page on your website to check out what it is you are advertising. In terms of return on investment, this aspect of digital marketing alone trumps all other forms of marketing.

The specialists in online & digital for your show

Ampro Media specialises in online digital marketing. We can run digital advertising campaigns for your show, allowing you to take advantage of cost effective advertising that reaches your potential audience and new audiences alike. Want to know more? Give us a shout on our contact page.

Our methods are of course suitable for any business to use for marketing and promoting their products & services. Of course, we at Ampro Media specialise in promoting shows. As we like to say, “It’s your show!”